A couple next to me is discussing the oppressive tipping situation, which seems to them a harbinger of the end of days, a vignette I want to share as an amusing observation with another friend who is right now marching in a Labor Day parade, surely chanting something worker affirming, but I cannot share that story because I am at this moment enjoying a chai latte after tipping the barista merely the change from a $10 for a $9 muffin, the privilege of which would disgust as much as amuse him, and that’s not what I’m going for, “going for” being illusive with that friend already as I sit here in my bedazzled New Orleans t-shirt.
I bond with people who border on madness, more men border on madness than women in real life, in literature the maniacs are all women who are wild-tressed sexually unhinged brunettes, which I suppose is what attracts the somewhat troubled men to me, as if their cocks are homing pigeons to my trope.
I am told that I am quite funny. Inappropriate is the marrow of my humor, to be safely shared with a meeting of eyes, an unspoken understanding calling attention to something they should not be thinking but which they are thinking, tamping down a giggle behind a cough. Think "sweater pants". Bam, intimacy sparked.
My instinct is finding something absurd to deflate the stated agenda, whatever that agenda may be, because although there are countless agendas in gatherings of humans, typically someone is in charge and the goal is absurd (to me). If I were marching around and picnicing in Caz park for workers’ rights today, for instance, I would be doing so, on the face of it, because I believe baristas should get dental coverage (I don’t have dental coverage – does anyone actually have dental coverage?). But. I can imagine the march from here, a stimulating mix of diverse folks chanting lustily, one of whom is my friend, his earnestness rendering him something akin to a grown boy scout ripe for defiling. I’d be all about the rights of workers while actually observing the body of my friend, who has come back now (mostly) from losing his mind over the little wife who left him for the man she was sleeping with when she married him. He has gained weight how men tend to do that, I've noticed, a hard ripe tummy, the kind of weight people put on after they have been molested, a protective girth. I tell him that he needs a dog, and I send him petfinder ads every morning. But. He needs an affair with a married woman, needs to shave that tummy right off with the nervy energy of illicit desire, and I might even suggest that course of action, a perfectly innocent proposition from me as I am not (yet) married. He might say that such an affair would be unthinkable, given that he was torn asunder by infidelity – if so, he’s not yet to the later phase when you find that it didn’t kill you / it isn’t fatal.
They are probably together, my friend and the coworker I threw down with once (twice maybe) (those were dark cloudy days), whose attendance at worthy marches is a given. The coworker’s ass ranks number one in drunken ladies room confessionals and, despite the public do-gooding, he has a susceptibility to doing no-good that I personally tested (epic fail). We never have spoken about that incident, but since then he occasionally quips that I might puke, as in ‘don’t tell her that gross story or she might gag’, comments that invariably make him blush scarlet. What I can't remember I can well guess, so clearly sticking in his mind that he has a Pavlovian response to my putting so much as a carrot stick in my mouth at picnics.
I leave it simmer.
I am contemplating: the relationship between desire and stress. Not a little stress causes too much online shopping typa deal. I’m talking about the duress of life:death:meaning:need colliding like fusion, unearthing desires buried in drums that were never supposed to leak. But they do.
